US President Donald Trump once again takes shots at Canada as he claimed the country was “very nasty to us on trade.”
At a briefing in Asheville, North Carolina, on Friday, the president’s first stop of his second term, Trump said he had asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau what would happen if the United States “didn’t subsidize Canada.”
The president made those comments immediately after being asked about US trade with the UK.
He alleged that during a conversation with the prime minister, Trudeau responded that Canada would be a “failed nation” without the United States.
Trudeau visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in November, shortly after Trump initially threatened a 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods entering the United States.
On his inauguration day, Trump suggested that those tariffs could be deployed as soon as February 1.
In North Carolina, Trump repeated that the U.S. doesn’t need Canada’s “cars or lumber or food products because we make the same products across the border.”
He also said Canadians would have “much better” health coverage if the country joined the United States.
“I think the people of Canada would like it,” the president said.
US President Donald Trump continued his threats to impose tariffs on Canada while speaking to reporters in North Carolina on Friday.
Trudeau said Tuesday that Canada is prepared to slap dollar-for-dollar gaming tariffs on American products if the United States enacts its promised tariff scheme, a program that could result in levies on hundreds of billions of dollars of American imports. .
“We don’t think he wants that,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa of the countermeasures.
CBC News has contacted the Prime Minister’s Office for comment on whether Trump’s account of the exchange is accurate.
But this would not be the first time the president has shared a misleading account of conversations he had with the prime minister.
During a recent interview with MSNBC’s Inside with Jen PsakiTrudeau noted that Trump left out the prime minister’s responses when publicly recounting their conversation at Mar-a-Lago.
Trudeau said that in response to Trump floating the idea of making Canada the “51st state,” he suggested that “maybe there could be a trade-off for Vermont or California for certain parts.”
That response “made Trump decide it wasn’t that funny anymore, and we moved on to a different conversation,” Trudeau told host Jen Psaki.
